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This paper investigates the relationship between union organization, workplace representation, the quality of industrial relations and strike incidence, as well as the implications of the matters at stake in localized disputes. Strike incidence is found to be higher in establishments where union density is higher, and where workers are covered by mixed-level collective agreements and in flexible employment. Further, distrust is associated with increased strike incidence, and conversely for employee-focused strategies and heightened employee motivation. These results are robust to controls for possible endogeneity of union density and country (cluster) heterogeneity. In terms of outcomes, higher union density, works councils, profit sharing, and a machine/computer-driven work pace are associated with worker wins, while collective bargaining, firm profitability, and more frequent meetings with management are linked with more balanced agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a cross section of matched data from the employee and management questionnaires of the European Company Survey for 28 nations, this paper investigates the determinants of worker commitment and the potential contribution of commitment to establishment performance. An index of worker commitment is constructed from employer perceptions of the motivation of workers and their retention and absenteeism propensities, while the determinants of commitment are fashioned from observations taken from the worker representation side, ordered along dimensions such as perceived organizational trust and involvement. The commitment index is then linked to establishment performance outcomes. Key findings from the commitment equation are the positive role of trust in management, the quality of information exchanged, and the degree of worker representation influence in respect of major decisions taken by management. In turn, commitment emerges as a key correlate of establishment financial performance and labor productivity growth. Our supplemental sensitivity analysis is supportive of the interpretation of commitment as a driver of performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors deploy a measure of occupational mismatch based on the discrepancy between the portfolio of skills required by an occupation and the array of abilities possessed by the worker for learning those skills. Using data from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) and the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79 and NLSY97), they report distinct gender differences in match quality and changes in match quality over the course of careers. They also show that a substantial portion of the gender wage gap stems from match quality differences among the college educated. College-educated females show a significantly greater likelihood of mismatch than do males. Moreover, individuals with children and those in more flexible occupations tend to experience a larger degree of mismatch. Cohort effects are also evident in the data: College-educated males of the younger cohort (NLSY97) are worse off in terms of match quality compared to the older cohort (NLSY79), even as the younger cohort of women is doing better on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the European Company Survey for a cluster of nations possessing a common system of workplace representation, we consider two factors deemed important correlates of firm performance, namely the deployment of structured management practices and the presence of works councils. The outcome indicators are management's assessment of establishment financial performance and labor productivity growth. For the full sample of works council and non-works council establishments, we report that better management practices are strongly associated with improved establishment performance, independent of works council presence, while the autonomous 'contribution' of works council presence is negative and statistically significant in the case of the labor productivity outcome but not profitability. Management perceptions of different aspects of works council operation were then used to categorize works council types, but generally failed to produce a consistent pattern of finding with respect to the outcome indicators. The same was true of employee views of management, although in both cases the strong positive association between better management practices and both performance measures persisted. However, use of a bilateral measure of industrial relations quality yielded consistency. That is, distrust of the other side and disagreement as to the climate of industrial relations each recorded a significantly negative association with financial performance and labor productivity growth, while the relation between management practices and performance was unchanged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the association between a measure of works council heterogeneity and plant closings in Germany, 2006–2015. Two datasets are used to identify failed establishments, while institutional heterogeneity is captured by management perceptions of the role of the works council in managerial decision making and also by allowing for works council learning. The potential moderating role of sectoral collective bargaining is also examined. We report that works councils per se are not associated with plant closure. Rather, it is establishments with disaffected councils that display higher rates of closure. The latter result does not obtain where such establishments are covered by sectoral agreements; an outcome that is consistent with the literature on the mitigation of rent-seeking behaviour, and one that also receives support from our finding that plants with dissonant councils are more likely than their consensual counterparts to transition into sectoral bargaining coverage. On the other hand, there is only limited evidence of works council learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article updates the 1995 study by Macpherson and Hirsch that used monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) data from 1973 to 1993 to examine the effects of occupational gender composition on earnings. In the updating process, the authors correct for biases in this data set that are attributable to the inclusion of imputed earners and the misreporting of occupation. They use CPS data from 1996 to 2010 to provide cross-sectional estimates of the impact of the feminization of occupations on wages, as well as its contribution to the gender wage gap. Longitudinal CPS data indicate that the negative effects of gender composition on earnings observed in cross-sectional data are lessened when researchers control for observed heterogeneity and are much reduced when controlling for unobserved heterogeneity. These findings are confirmed using much longer panels from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). Finally, the use of synthetic panels of aging cohorts suggests that wage penalties are largest for younger cohorts in predominantly female occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the effects of minimum wages on employment. It mentions that research focused on state data and followed either an industry case study approach exploiting geographical variation in the setting of minimum wages or a standard state panel route in which state effects were held constant. It also reveals that linear trends approach was initially criticized for its potential for bias stemming from the choice of sample period, and on the grounds that any post-treatment deviation in employment growth will attenuate an estimated static treatment.

Using European Company Survey data, this article explores the relationship between trust and establishment performance under works councils, on the one hand, and union bodies on the other. Trust is initially measured using the individual survey respondent's assessment of the 'contribution' of the other side. Although the rating of the employee representative is favoured over that of management as less subject to feedback from performance, the potential endogeneity of employee trust in management is also modelled. Next, a preferred inverse measure of trust (or dissonance) is constructed from the discrepancy between the assessments of the two sides of the quality of workplace industrial relations. Employee trust is associated throughout with improved establishment performance, and conversely for the dissonance counterpart. In their presence, neither type of workplace representation is superior to the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

he authors investigate the employment consequences of minimum wage regulation for women in 16 OECD countries during 1970 to 2008. The treatment follows that of Neumark and Wascher's (2004)cross-country study using panel methods to estimate minimum wage effects among teenagers and young adults, although they focus on prime-age females-a group often neglected in the minimum wage literature. Moreover, their analysis covers a longer time interval and deploys time-varying policy and institutional regressors. They report average effects consistent with minimum wages causing material employment losses among the target group and, less conclusively, elevated joblessness as well. Their cross-country findings agree with Neumark and Wascher on the role of some individual labor market institutions and policies, but the authors do not observe the same patterns in the institutional data: specifically, prime-age females do not exhibit stronger employment losses in countries with the least regulated markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using matched employer-employee data from the German LIAB for 2001, the authors found that German works councils are in general associated with higher earnings, even after accounting for establishment- and worker heterogeneity. Works council wage premia exceed those of collective bargaining and are higher, in fact, where both institutions are present in the workplace. The authors also found evidence indicating that works councils benefit women relative to men and appear to favor foreign, east-German, and service-sector workers as well. Separate evidence from quantile regressions suggests that the conjunction of works council presence and collective bargaining is important to the narrowing process. In smaller plants even the presence of a works council markup depends on the coexistence of the works council entity with the machinery of collective bargaining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theory suggests that firms confront a hold-up problem in dealing with workplace unionism: unions will appropriate a portion of the quasi-rents stemming from long-lived capital. As a result, firms may be expected to limit their exposure to rent-seeking by reducing investments. The U.S. evidence points clearly in this direction. The authors of this paper investigate whether the same is true for German works councils,the analogue of workplace unionism in that nation. Using establishment panel data for the years 1998-2003, they find no evidence that a works council's formation adversely affect investment or that its dissolution favorably affected investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The principal justification for minimum wage legislation has been the claim that it would improve the economic condition of low-wage workers. Most previous analyses of the distributional effects of minimum wages have been based on simulation exercises employing restrictive assumptions that guarantee the conclusion that an increase in the minimum wage reduces poverty. In contrast, the authors of this paper adopt a more flexible 'reduced-form' approach that links increases in both federal and state minima to contemporaneous changes in poverty rates. For the period 1983-96, they find indications of a poverty-reducing effect of minimum wages among teenagers and older junior high school dropouts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Displaced workers with generous periods of advance notice are more likely than their non-notified counterparts to avoid post-displacement unemployment altogether, but once unemployed, they tend to escape from unemployment much more slowly. The authors, using data from the five-year retrospective 1988 and 1990 Displaced Worker Surveys, examine three potential explanations for this puzzle: delaying behavior induced by the receipt of unemployment insurance, nonrandom distribution of notice to workers, and previous studies' failure to appropriately incorporate the pre-displacement search time of notified workers. This analysis supports the third explanation. After allowing for less intense search prior to displacement than following displacement, the authors find that the pattern of escape rates for otherwise observationally equivalent workers does not differ by notification status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the recent progress and future direction of labor policy in the European Community, now the European Union. The authors show that most of the mandates foreshadowed under the December 1989 Community Social Charter have now been enacted into law. They analyze the possible costs, as well as the benefits, of these first-phase mandates and show the link between these adjustment costs and the Community's policy of providing subsidies to its poorer member states. They also demonstrate how the new Treaty on European Union, agreed to at Maastricht in December 1991, has increased the scope for Community-level labor market regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) of 1988 requires that covered firms provide affected employees with 60 days' advance notice of plant closings and large-scale layoffs. The authors use data from the three most recent Displaced Worker Surveys to compare the extent of notice under voluntary (1983-88) and mandatory (1989-91) notice regimes. They find that the legislation has had at most a small impact on the provision of notice of the length stipulated under the Act. This non- event is at least partially due to the liberal firm-size and layoff thresholds for determining coverage under WARN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how advance notice of layoff affects the incidence and duration of unemployment following displacement. The authors use the Displaced Worker Survey for 1988, which, unlike earlier surveys in the series, contains information on written notice. The results are mixed. Longer written notice may more than double the proportion of white-collar workers who move directly to new employment. But written notice has no such positive effects for blue-collar workers, regardless of its length. Informal (unwritten) notice benefits male workers, either by improving their chances of avoiding unemployment (white-collar men) or by reducing the average spell of unemployment (blue-collar men). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on a research conducted by Stephen Nord and Yuan Ting on the effect of advance notice of plant closings on earnings and unemployment. In this paper, an empirical analysis is presented that focuses on the unemployment results of the authors. Moreover, the details of the methodology used in the study are presented in this paper, wherein they consider the relationship between advance notice and the duration of post-displacement joblessness. In addition, the article presents views on regression estimates obtained by the authors.

This study investigates the content, status, and likely impact of the Social Charter, a declaration of social rights (primarily workers' rights) endorsed by the European Community in December 1989. The European Commission, which initiated the Charter, has justified the mandated benefits proposed under it as a means for advancing social equality. The authors argue, however, that by raising costs, inhibiting employment growth, and disproportionately affecting poorer workers and nations, the mandated benefits approach is likely to cause less rather than more equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional analyses of the effect of unemployment insurance (UI) on unemployment duration have neglected the issue of sample construction. The authors show that such studies, by failing to account for job finding among those eligible for UI within intervals corresponding to the waiting time and filing delays associated with drawing benefits, overstate the expected unemployment duration of UI recipients while understating that of nonrecipients; ignore a dominant line of causation running from duration to UI benefit status; produce misspecified hazard functions; and may overstate by as much as 50% the effect of the UI replacement rate on jobless duration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the 1984 Displaced Worker Survey, the authors model the determinants of time without work following job displacement for a large sample of workers laid off because of plant shutdowns between 1979 and 1984. The major focus of the paper is on the role of advance notification in mitigating unemployment. The estimating procedure accommodates right censored observations stemming from continuing or open-ended spells of unemployment. Advance notification is found to have significantly reduced the duration of unemployment of those notified workers who did not draw unemployment insurance benefits and, in particular, of those who left the plant prior to termination. Advance notice had much less effect on the time without work of notified workers whose spell length of unemployment was long enough for them to collect unemployment insurance benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on papers dealing with economic effects of job loss and job change which appeared in the October 1987 issue. It discusses the earnings losses of displaced workers. It explores the differences in the findings of the papers on earnings of displaced workers. It states the advantages of using data from the 1984 Displaced Worker Survey. It comments on the paper which investigated advanced notification of unemployment. It offers an overview of the adjustment difficulties faced by displaced workers.

The authors use CPS micro data to derive estimates of retention rates and eventual lifetime tenure probabilities for union and nonunion workers. Although both groups enjoy a considerable degree of near-lifetime employment (defined as eventual tenure of 20+ years with the firm), union workers evince measurably higher eventual tenure than their nonunion counterparts, especially among those with lower current tenure. A separate analysis suggests that this outcome may result in part from better job matching for union than for nonunion workers. The authors hypothesize that union workers enjoy an informational advantage in the labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of its industrial relations architecture, characteristic of the 'southern European group' and intimately linked to the recommendations of the Troika, this paper examines four key aspects of Portuguese collective bargaining. First, it provides definitive estimates of private sector union density for that nation. Second, it models the determinants of union density at firm level. Third, it yields estimates of the union wage gap for different ranges of union density. The final issue examined is contract coverage. The received notion that the pronounced reduction in the number of industry-wide agreements and extension ordinances of late is to be equated with a fall in coverage is shown to be a chimera, the number of workers covered by new and existing agreements remaining largely unaffected by the economic crisis. The reduced frequency of new agreements and extensions is instead attributed to downward nominal wage rigidity in low-inflation regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pacts for employment and competitiveness are an integral component of the ongoing process of decentralization of collective bargaining in Germany, a phenomenon that has been hailed as key to that nation's economic resurgence. Yet little is known about the effects of pacts on firm performance. The evidence largely pertains to employment and is decidedly mixed. This article investigates the association between pacts and six outcome indicators using a framework in which the controls comprise establishments that negotiated over pacts but failed to reach agreement on their implementation. An extensive set of robustness checks are run to test the sensitivity of the key findings of the model. There is no suggestion of pacts negatively impacting any of the selected measures of establishment performance. Rather, the evidence points to some positive short- and medium-run effects on firm average wages and possibly employment and innovation as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates collective bargaining trends in the German private sector since 2000. Using data from the IAB Establishment Panel and the German Establishment History Panel, it provides both cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence on these developments. It confirms that the hemorrhaging of sectoral bargaining, first observed in the 1980s and 1990s, is ongoing. Furthermore, works councils are also in decline, so that the dual system also displays erosion. For their part, any increases in collective bargaining at firm level have been minimal in recent years, while the behavior of newly-founded and closing establishments does not seem to lie at the root of a burgeoning collective bargaining free sector. Although there are few obvious signs of an organic reversal of the process, some revitalization of the bargaining system from above is implied by the labor policies of the new coalition government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the level of theory, the effect of collective bargaining on innovation is contested. The large proponderance of the U.S. evidence clearly points to adverse effects, but other-country experience suggests that certain industrial-relations systems, or the wider regulatory apparatus, might even tip the balance in favor of unions. Our pooled cross- section and difference-in-differences estimates provide some weak evidence that German collective bargaining inhibits innovation. However, in conjunction with workplace representation, there is the suggestion that it might actually foster innovative activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the design of the machinery of collective bargaining from the perspective of microeconomic and macroeconomic flexibility. In the former context, somewhat greater attention is given over to enterprise flexibility than external adjustment. In the latter context, close attention is also paid to changes in collective bargaining along the dimensions of bargaining coverage, structure, and coordination. Support is adduced for the German, contemporary Scandinavian, and British models. The role of trust in securing micro and macro flexibility also receives attention, suggesting that the polder or Dutch model might also be expected to populate the firmament of fit-for-purpose collective bargaining arrangements. JEL Classification: Microeconomics/Institutions (D02), Institutions and the Macroeconomy (E02), Employment/Unemployment/Wages (E24), Income Distribution (E25), Macroeconomic Policy Objectives (E61), Labor Economics Policies (JO8) Trades Unions (J51), Collective Bargaining (J52), Labor-Management Relations (J53), Public Policy (J58), Comparative Analysis of Economic Systems (P51) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is sometimes alleged that collective bargaining coverage in Germany is understated because uncovered firms 'orient' themselves toward sectoral agreements. In fact, although orientation has grown as sectoral bargaining has declined, their joint frequency has fallen. Further, where orientation occurs at firms that leave a sectoral agreement, it provides only partial compensation. The small deficits involved, in conjunction with some indirect evidence on joiners, suggest some modest attenuation of the undoubted decline in collective bargaining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That German trade unionism is in profound decline seems to be beyond dispute. More controversial is the implied change in union impact on worker wages. A linked employer-employee dataset is deployed over an interval of continuing decline in unionism to address this issue. Over the sample period 2000-2010 it is found that joining a sectoral agreement always produces higher wages, while exiting one no longer leads to wage losses if the transition is to a firm agreement. Leaving a firm agreement to non-coverage also leads to wage reductions, while joining one from non-coverage appears decreasingly favorable. The one constant is the persistence of a small positive union wage gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Atypical work arrangements have long been criticized as offering more precarious and lower paid work than regular open-ended employment. An important British paper by Booth et al. ( Economic Journal, Vol. 112 (2002), No. 480, pp. F189-F213) was among the first to recognize such jobs also functioned as a stepping stone to permanent work. This conclusion proved prescient, receiving increased support in Europe. Here, we provide a broadly parallel analysis for the USA, where research has been less targeted on this issue. We report similar findings for temporary workers in the USA as found for fixed-term contract workers in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the NLSY79, this paper considers the role of gender in promotion and promotion-related earnings development over the course of a career. The raw data suggest reasonably favorable promotion outcomes for females over a career, but any such advantages are found to be confined to less educated females. Further, the strong returns to education in later career stemming from promotion-related earnings growth accrue solely to males. While consistent with fertility timing and choice on the part of educated females, this earnings result is not inconsistent with discrimination as well, reminiscent of findings from an earlier human capital literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]